Gerald Davis

Themes of sexuality, longing and lost innocence run throughout Gerald Davis’s work. Salvaging from his own personal experiences, Davis’s paintings often capture the turbulence of youth, championing all its awkwardness, embarrassment and sentimentality. Executed with the chastity of cartoon illustration, Davis’s fairytale images are cringe-worthy disclosures of preteen puppy-love, weaving shame and humiliation into Freudian celebrations of identity and acceptance. For Hillary is presented as a dyptich. One panel tells Davis’s true 7th grade tale of primping for a (never received) hand-job for which he devised an ill-crafted mirken; the other canvas is a representation of the desire and fear the girl inspired in him.

Gerald Davis adopts cartooning as the most logical tool for expression. His images capitalise on exaggerated gesture to convey magnified emotion. Davis’s monochrome palette is used as an atmospheric device, forcing the viewer to visually and emotionally adjust to the image space. In Boy-fight, Davis portrays the relationship dynamic he had with a childhood frenemy. Rendered in hazy tones, his canvas hovers between youthful innocence and adult knowingness. Using the pristine qualities of illustration, his painting conveys a brittle fragility, visually distilling the precarious balance between love, hate, and sexual desire.

“Usually, I paint things that I am fond of.” Gerald Davis explains, “I think the best images I have made are done out of love. I think of the paintings as tributes to the subjects they depict, so I want them to be as seductive and beautiful as I can make them.”

Davis’s work is inspired from an unlikely combination of artists, including Al Jaffee, R. Crumb, Robert Yarber, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder; the exaggerated style of cartoon illustration befittingly describes his contemporary suburban folklore. In Hunter, Davis’s portrait of a boyhood mate is at once tragic and comic. Recalling the twee innocence of Normal Rockwell, Davis’s hero is rendered repulsed, inept, and pathetic; his entire canvas radiates a whitened queasy pallor. The honesty of cartooning allows Davis to explore uncomfortable issues such as gender roles, sexuality, and social exclusion with an unabashed frankness. Presenting this genre on a grand scale, Davis merges the vogue of graphic art with the authority of art history, creating paintings that are both funny and meaningful.

“Monica is about a girl that I was strongly attracted to in 1986.” Gerald Davis reveals. “I recall having very vivid fantasies about her even at that young age. This event never took place – I never made my feelings known to her – so I made it happen with an image.”
Executed with muted palette, Davis’s surfaces replicate remote dreamscapes. Prepubescent misadventures of scatology, sexual experimentation, and girlfriends-that-never-were imbue his paintings with the purifying qualities of confession. Through his practice, Davis strives to expose ‘hidden truths’, excavating intrinsic beauty from the abject and grotesque. His canvases operate as accolades to their abashed narratives, affirming humility as a shared human value.

Illustrating a childish ‘down there’ curiosity gone terribly wrong, Gerald Davis’s Linsey’s Poo is painted in fragrant teen-girl tones, innocently celebrating the naïve discovery of deviance. Set as a diptych, Davis’s canvases contain both image and text. In the panel on the right, delicate layers of pastel hue trace out the pubescent wishes of x-ray vision, pubis and bowels merging decoratively with tweenie fashion. On the right, a letter describing the joys of containment and relief emerges from Davis’s tangled patterning, the humiliating content humorously at odds with the bubbly script and Beyoncé writing pad.

Illustrating a childish ‘down there’ curiosity gone terribly wrong, Gerald Davis’s Linsey’s Poo is painted in fragrant teen-girl tones, innocently celebrating the naïve discovery of deviance. Set as a diptych, Davis’s canvases contain both image and text. In the panel on the right, delicate layers of pastel hue trace out the pubescent wishes of x-ray vision, pubis and bowels merging decoratively with tweenie fashion. On the right, a letter describing the joys of containment and relief emerges from Davis’s tangled patterning, the humiliating content humorously at odds with the bubbly script and Beyoncé writing pad.

Presented as a triptych and reminiscent of comic book story frames, Gerald Davis’s Animation Is Not Faggity is laid out in narrative tableaux. Throughout each panel, Davis’s ephemeral and gangly style creates a misfit air of vulnerability, reinforced through uncomfortable perspective, violent cropping, and inclusion of ominous details. Rendered in cinematic sepia tones, Davis uses soft lighting for dramatic effect, providing religious overtones to his fable of bullying; the figure in the final panel is posed similarly to historical depictions of the tortured St. Sebastian.